The Mayan Civilization first appeared around 8,000 B.C. in the Pre-Classic Period. They were noted for the Mayan Heiroglyphs, the only known writing in the Americas at that time. The Mayan Empire was extensive, its dominion huge, its power and wealth beyond compare, its high civilization lasting over 1,000 years until about 900 A.D. when suddenly, it was gone.
The Urban Legend has it that they vanished overnight. This might have happened elsewhere, but not with the Mayans. They were overcome by internal warfare and political greed.
Their Cosmos was divided into four parts, governed by the Cardinal Compass Points, and their World was divided into three sections, Celestial Sphere, Middle Earth and the Underworld, a vision shared by most early humans — a view commonly shared and held today.
The Mayans had in common a deep knowledge of Agricultural Astronomy, Blood Sacrifice and a Medicine Wheel ruled by four Gods.
Around 6,000 B.C.E., the Mayans had already developed plant domestication and had formed a number of sedentary agrarian societies around MesoAmerican territory, which spread across the lower part of North America, well into the area of Central America.
The climate allowed diverse plants to grow and be developed by the early farmers, but everywhere in the Mayan civilization were cultured and harvested crops of maize, beans and squashes of all kinds, along with peppers, seeds and onions.
The Mayans regarded the world as basically a hostile place, and its Gods vicious and demanding, treacherous and unreliable.
The culture can be classified as Neolithic, Stone-Age, and they mined and fashioned gold, silver and copper into jewelry and ritual items. They had no horses, no draft animals of any kind, and did not typically domesticate animals large or small.
The primary means of transportation was on foot and, although they had small canoe-like boats, they did not tend to travel far, even on trade routes, and certainly were not interested in world-exploration on any notable scale.
The Mayans were linguistically diverse, speaking Mayan, Mixe-Zoquean, Otomanguean and Uto-Aztecan, with a surprisingly large number of loanwords from one language to another, and the use of a vigesimal 20-based numbering system.
The Maya engaged dynamically and vigorously with many neighboring cultures including the Aztecs, Mixtecs and Olmecs. It was during the Post-Classic Period, from 950 A.D. until the final collapse in 1539 A.D. at the hands of the Conquistadors and other European raiders, that the major cities, including Chichen-Itza, were abandoned, creating an apparent mystery which can easily be resolved by reading the inscriptions on the very few Mayan monuments, and only three books out of tens of thousands written by the Mayans, and those few surviving remnants of their culture which had been accidentally left intact by the Europeans.
We can see today thousands of pyramids, government buildings and homes scattered throughout the Mayan Empire’s territory, now covered in a mass of jungle vegetation, almost unfindable even with overhead views from planes and satellites.
It’s hard to imagine how tight and uncorruptible a jungle is, and how rapidly it overtakes any semblance of order imposed by civilization. The jungle takes back its own. That’s the rule, and it happens every single time.
Nothing escapes the rot. Not a single morsel of civilization will stand when the jungle has overgrown everything in an endless sea of green.
The Mayans came up to the Yucatan Peninsula from Guatemala, where they had abandoned their cities to migrate to the north because of serious climate changes which made continued existence in Guatemala impossible for the entire culture, which included many large tribes and family groups.
Everything was pretty much all right with the Mayans for the first 800 years or so, from about 200 B.C.E. to 800 A.D., at which time there was a serious drought, which brought ruin to many families, and incited a rebel group to riot.
A 100 year civil war ensued, multiplying exponentially the miseries caused by the annual dry-summer droughts, which were mild, and might well have been survivable, had the wars not brought down the level of civilization to brute gang rule.
Keep in mind that the Mayans had always waged brutal civil wars, at least fifty of them, as well as conducting warfare against neighboring tribes and cultures, and that they had a bloody ritual sacrifice at the heart of every move they made.
So armed with only that knowledge, we could only conclude that the Mayan Empire was brought down by warfare in combination with other factors, such as economics, famine and the ever-popular influenza and plague epidemics that crop up now and then among every human population.
In fact, the Mayan Culture had a relatively slow decline, as people moved out of the area into further and further reaches of unexplored territory, ancient and medieval settlers opening up new areas where before there had been only other tribes, which of course count for nothing.
All tribes refer to themselves as “The People”, and all other tribes as “Animals”. This is well explored in “Seven Pillars of Wisdom” by T.E. Lawrence, and is relied upon extensively in the film “Lawrence of Arabia” for the development of some of the more grisly and gruesome plot points of the Hollywood movie.
Ultimately, there is no mystery to where the Mayans went. They are, in fact, still there — they’ve always been there, but settlers are unconscious to their presence. After all, they’re only aboriginals, of no concern or consequence. This is what makes many tribes invisible to other tribes.
The Mayans never left, and in fact, they are still there to this day. They merely switched their culture from Urban back to Agrarian, in order to accommodate the new social structures necessary to the new economics, the new politics and the new situation, meaning the Spanish Conquistadores, a problem with which no Native American culture ever dealt with to a good end, even to the Spanish, because the plunder of gold and silver led to a European economic collapse because there was too much money on the market.
The Mayan Culture had a steady agrarian economy of trade and barter, and this required the establishment of trade routes and exo-tribal trading partners, which led ultimately to the influx of new ideas and new values from other surrounding cultures, which eventually undermined the power of the Mayan rulers, leading to ultimate catastrophic collapse and internecine warfare, which spells the death of any civilization new or old.
The 13th Ajaw of Copan, or Oxwitik, in what is today modern Honduras, Uaxeclajuun Ub’aah K’awiil, otherwise known as “18 Rabbit”, inherited the throne from the 12th ruler, Smoke Imix, on January 2, 695 A.D., and earned the reputation as the greatest Mayan builder of the period.
Bloodletting Sacrifice was the ritual of choice for the Mayans, and winning the game at the sacred ballcourt meant that the winning team got to be sacrificed and sent to the Home of the Gods, a fairly common idea among humans of Planet Earth.
18 Rabbit, under a flag of truce, was captured and beheaded by K’ak Tiliw Chan Yopaat, ruler of a small nearby kingdom, on May 3, 738 A.D.. This spelled disaster for the Mayans and certainly contributed greatly to their downfall.
The Mayans actually relished warfare and regarded it as a high point in their day if they enjoyed some combat and bloodshed sometime during each day, and when they could obtain a few prisoners from other village or province, they lost no time preparing him for ritual sacrifice — the Mayan Gods were a bloodthirsty lot and demanded a lot of victims.
The loss of trade routes and trading partners was the inevitable result of the assassination of the greatest patron of the arts of the Mayan Civilization, 18 Rabbit, and from then on, the culture never recovered from the blow.
Yopaat held power as the 14th Ruler, but under his rule, no new construction was undertaken and the Kingdom of Copan succumbed briefly to the Kingdom of Tikal befoe everything was plowed under the jungle greenery until its rediscovery in the 19th century.
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